Newly Published Bible Seeks Specifically to Appeal to African-Americans

By David CrummKnight Ridder Newspapers
12/11/’99

DETROIT - After years of research and planning, the American Bible Society – the nearly 200-year-old group that distributes Bibles nationwide – has created a Bible especially geared toward African-American worshipers.

Focus groups with black youth across the country helped the society team create the new Bible, which is filled with 300 pages of material about the distinctive Christian experience of African-Americans. Entitled, The African-American Jubilee Edition Holy Bible, it’s being considered a landmark in Bible publishing. In addition to the traditional Biblical text, the new Bible includes 300 pages of articles by a broad range of Black scholars about African-Americans' history and their Christian heritage.

Later this month, promotions of the Bible will he launched in a series of city-by-city celebrations that will start in Atlanta and continue through next year. The Rev. Kevin Turman, pastor of historic Second Baptist Church in Detroit, was given one of the first copies of the Bible a week ago. “This is very exciting. It provides us with a common touchstone,” Turman said. “We need to reconnect with younger people. They're not only disconnected from the experiences of slavery and emancipation and segregation. I'm disturbed because, when I talk with younger people, I find that they're disconnected from people like Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. They're cut off from the strength that has brought us this far.”

While many African-Americans have prospered, others still are facing a bleak future in impoverished city neighborhoods, said the Rev. Diane Ritzie, a Biblical scholar, prison chaplain and Baptist pastor from New York who managed the Bible project. “I live in the south Bronx, and I can tell you there are some communities where the poverty is just overwhelming,” Ritzie said. “We want to offer hope by reminding our people about our heritage.” So Ritzie pushed to include a chapter about pioneering women preachers. One example: As early as the Civil War era, the book points out, Amanda Berry Smith was criss-crossing the United States, preaching sermons so powerful that she became known in her day as, “God’s image carved in ebony.”

The society expects to sell at least 200,000 copies during the next year and 1 million during the next five years, said Fred Allen. a spokesman for the American Bible Society. The current edition contains only the books of the Protestant Bible – but, within the next few years, the society would like to release a Catholic version, including the Apocrypha, the 15 extra books that are part of Catholic Bibles, Allen said.

Just as important as reconnecting African-Americans with their Christian heritage is reconnecting the Bible itself with Africa, said Dennis Dickerson, professor of history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, who wrote one of the articles for the new Bible. “People get the idea that the Bible is a white man's book,” said Dickerson. “But God didn't dictate it to us in the King’s English. The Bible is a multicultural document that derives from a part of the world where there are many people of color.”

“Our people have had an extraordinary historical ride with the Bible,” said the Rev. Elliott Cuff, a historian and Baptist pastor from New York who wrote about the history of Black preaching in the new Bible. However, even with 300 pages of material about Black heritage, “I really don’t think this Bible goes far enough,” said Cuff. “Someday I’d like to see a companion African-American encyclopedia of the Bible. There’s so much good scholarship out there now.”

In Detroit, Turman said the new Bible may be part of a renaissance of African-American scholarship that may extend beyond the boundaries of the Black community. Turman points to the popularity of the new encyclopedia Africana and the recent PBS series, “Wonders of the African World,” both supervised by Harvard University’s Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Within the realm of religious scholarship, recent books by the Rev. Peter Gomes, the pastor of Harvard’s Memorial Church, also have found an audience far beyond the Black community. “This new Bible is a real milestone,” said Turman. “I hope we’re seeing the beginning of a very exciting conversation in this country about African-American religious culture.”

In an attempt to make the African presence relevant within the Bible, I applauded and actually obtained a copy for myself.

However, after going through it, with its extremely stylized pictures of the Prophets and other Biblical men of reknown within its pages, I took special notice to a certain picture of "PUNTUS PILATE", in which the publishers had decided to depict as an overweight black man, sitting on a throne and dressed in kente cloth robes. :?:

Being that most of us should by now know that PILATE (assuming he actually exsisted) would have most certainly been a Greek and therefore a Caucasian in the worst way, while I can award the publishers of this book a solid "A" for effort, we must also award them an "F" for accuracy.

In attempts to establish accuracy, credibility, and legitimacy for our legacy, we must not sacrifice that for the sake of blackwashing any and everything/one--inlcuding white men who notoriously wanted nothing more than to see the demise of us and our legacy.